by Atta (pdf)
old friend permit himself even a wry smile. “To Rubicun-
dia again, I suppose!” he said then, and raised his gourd
for a toast. This set me off, and I recounted to him all my
recent adventures. He listened in silence, nodding his
head occasionally and brightening a little at my description of the sack of Natissia. “I should like to have had a hand in that,” he said at one point. But he lowered his
eyes when I had finished and sat in silence; and after
that I waited in vain for any similar series of confidences
from him.
His air of depression rather alarmed me. For six
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months we had been forced to go our separate ways after
our abrupt parting in the Oval, and Fate’s final disposi7
tion to relent and allow us to be together again seemed
to me to merit something better than mere dejection.
Finally I said as much, hinting shamelessly that perhaps
I had overrated the attractions of our companionship for
him. At this he lowered his eyes again and said something that I did not catch.
“What was that?” I inquired.
“I said,” he replied in a low tone, “you saved my life
in the wilderness, and in the Oval I failed you and left
you to die.” To my astonishment he said this with bitter
emotion, and I saw that he meant it.
“But surely,” I protested, “you did all that the code requires? Why should you have been expected to do more?”
“I am not Nuru,” he retorted abruptly. “Do not quote
Fuse to me.” He stared at his nectar for some time.
“Would you have left me alone to fight such a Beast in
your country?” he demanded finally. “After you had
brought me to your city?”
Draca had been responsible for that, I pointed out; it
was the rule of the arena; in no circumstances could he
have fought beside me. Considering the way the contest
had turned out, I thought we had little to reproach ourselves with.
I said this with real conviction. But he merely rose
abruptly, went to my doorway, and looked down my
corridor. Then he came back and sat down without any
change of expression.
“I have had a long time to think my own thoughts,” he
said at last in a low tone. “And I have had many. One of
them is: What is the good of life if one cannot enjoy it
with one’s friend?”
And with that his reserve broke down and he began
plying me with questions about what I thought of Fusa.
In these questions, for the first time, he exhibited a genuine originality; and it came to me with something of a shock that while I had been drilling Fire Feeders and
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killing Natissians he had had many months in the Maternity Center in which to indulge in reflection.
We talked until nearly morning on that first night of
our reunion, and to this day it is a source of surprise to
me to remember the number of stumbling ideas that he
expressed in his troubled manner. Apparently everything
I had ever said to him had found lodgment in his awakening mind. To him, too, our entrance into Fusa had come as something of a shock, and its impact upon him was
even more bitter than upon me. There was one vital difference, however. Whereas I had accepted the situation superficially and sought to make the best of it by concealing my real aversion, Atta for the first time had been awakened to genuine thought, and the effort to keep his
conclusions to himself had been deep and painful. Beginning to understand his world, he could scarcely keep himself from struggling against it, from crying out
against it.
His was the pure spirit, mine the tarnished one.
The difference had come about, I suppose, partly because I felt no responsibility for Fusa or for anything Formican. To me our reunion was almost adolescent; it
was like some dim reminder of my almost forgotten life
on the farm. In Atta the experience went much deeper
and attacked his mature personality. For him, he said,
our house in the woods had answered a deep, unvoiced
desire that longed for simplicity. Ever since he had met
me, he said, he had been disturbed; he had felt that the
pounding, repetitive life of his day was choking him in
the throat and constricting him in the heart and making
of him a mere series of blind motions stretched briefly
between life and death. Ever since we had fortified our
little stronghold he had wanted somehow to begin over
again. He had wanted something he did not have, something he had missed, something he could not define: something he had and yet did not have. What this was
he did not know; yet he felt somehow that I had it, and
that Fusa had lost it.
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153
Thus he tried, fumblingly, to express his rebellion
against Fusa as he saw it now, and to disown his own
kinship to it; and there were moments that first evening
when I found it difficult to believe that he was a Form-
ican at all and not some higher spirit in Formican guise.
Even before that first night was over it was clear to me
that already Fusa had led Atta to identify himself infinitely more with me than with the Fusans or with the Forzans with whom he had been brought up. And his
thinking was no mere intellectual exercise, either, as I
soon had occasion to find out. It went deep into his
emotions, as one immediate incident amply proved.
Since early boyhood I have always been fairly proficient with the jackknife. I am, in fact, a fairly skilled wood carver—what we call in Iowa, a mumble-de-peg artist. To entertain myself on winter evenings as a boy I used often to imitate some chosen animal or bird—once,
to my subsequent regret, I carved old Grampa Brokell in
kitchen soap—and these little mementos were part of my
family tradition as well as of my own childhood.
Now, in my imposing gallery, I had nothing more than
one of my glass knives to work with, but it was better
than nothing—it had a pretty sharp edge—and during the
evenings of the first week of our reunion I succeeded in
fashioning from a piece of Fire Guard tinder a fairly good
replica of our old walnut house in the woods. This I put
on the open shelf when I went out to the drill ground
early one morning, and when I came back at noon what
was my surprise to find that Atta had taken it down and
was working on two small figures to put in it. They were
labeled Atta and “Brokle”—as Atta always pronounced
my name—and to my slightly misty eyes they were exactly
alike! Atta had refused even to seen any physical difference between us!
Again, we soon had occasion to make military visits
about the city together, and by comparison with the
gayety that we could sometimes scarcely restrain, the
relationships of of the grim Fusans we met were dry and
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brittle indeed. Never once did I see a Fusan smile on the
street, and a street accident never attracted a crowd. An
injured Formican could lie in the gutter and die unless
a policeman came along. Nobody paid him the slightest
attention. The reason, I suppose, was fear of being accused of a perso
nal, individual act of pity.
But the most striking example of Atta’s change was the
incident of my flute. For my own amusement, during our
separation, I had fashioned a new reed pipe with holes
that gave six different notes, so that it was almost a musical instrument. One evening soon after our reunion I took it out and played on it, and to my surprise Atta admitted
that he wanted to play it too. In Forza he had never
heard any music, and the sound of an individual melody
was entrancing to him. So strong did the desire eventually become that he spent many midnight hours fingering the instrument and trying to imitate me. In this he succeeded after several weeks, and my most amusing
memory of Fusa is still the night I returned to our gallery
very late from a meeting;at Oban’s and from far down
the corridor heard the notes of Home, Sweet Home
played uncertainly but lovingly by a new musician.
As soon as we were settled I made a new chessboard—
I explained to the toadlike Subser that it was a form of
military tactics—and Atta and I spent many a pleasant
evening drinking our nectar and trying new gambits on
each other. During these sessions, after Subser had gone
to his quarters, Atta asked me many questions of which
I am certain Nuru would have disapproved. But I am
afraid that I answered them most lamely. For they consisted of attempts to find out from me what wisdom men had found in the business of life, what explanations and
goals, what beliefs, and what political utopias. And I
found myself inadequately prepared to answer. Indeed,
who among us can completely set forth the story of the
passions and ideals of human history? Even now I should
hesitate to try, and in this, I find, I am not alone except
among the confident and the ignorant.
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155
For Atta I fell back on the chessmen as a rough approximation of medieval life—though I had to use good Queen Bess of England to explain the activities of the Queen—
and from there I went back to early man and the primitive family and the tribe and the race and so down to country and nation and the patriotism of my own land:
the brotherhood of idea, not of blood or frontier. All this
interested Atta excessively, and he struggled with it as a
kindergarten child might struggle in a university. But he
had the clear eyes of a child, and when he discovered
that I could not answer all his questions he became fascinated with the variety of mankind and in particular with my description of my own family; and after that he left
me alone for long intervals.
Meanwhile the daily business of our lives lay in the
Oval and on the drill grounds outside the South Gate,
and there ironically enough, we worked for Fusa very
conscientiously indeed. For the military leaders agreed
fully with Atta that the Rubicundians were no mere
neighboring tribe of savages, despite their truculent resemblance to ancient robber barons. They possessed a far-flung empire containing a good dozen strongholds
bigger than the one in which Atta and Subser and I had
been held prisoners. Merely their slaves were numbered
in thousands, and of these as many as twenty thousand
were already trained as warrior bearers of great speed.
This military mobility amounted to the possession of
twenty thousand fierce cavalrymen who could be thrown
against any objective without warning, and it presented
a most serious problem to anyone seeking to invade Rub-
icundia through the jungle and desert that surrounded it.
To meet the threat I again brought up the idea of Fusan
cavalry. And to my surprise I found the hitherto prejudiced Nuru willing to listen. Inasmuch as my conversation with him on this simple point was one of the evidences afterward used against Atta, I shall set it down.
Nuru: “How are the preparations coming?”
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I: “I am toying with the idea of suggesting Fabrans
again.”
Nuru: “Have you discussed it with Atta?”
I: “Yes.”
Nuru: “What is his opinion?”
I: “He says it is time Fusa welcomed the ideas of a
Stranger.”
Such was my brief conversation with Nuru on this
simple topic. You may find it slightly ridiculous of me to
set down such a plodding exchange; but because of the
faint intimation that Atta and I were capable of discussing Fusa in secret, the innocent statement was later used to prove that Atta had not only established an individual
relationship with me, but had also actually begun to infect
me with the virus of personal friendship. A traitor himself, he was proposing treason to me; he was setting me on an equality with Fusa itself.
Did I meanwhile suspect nothing of what was going
on? Did I accept as wholly accidental the presence once
more in my life of both Atta and Subser? Was I completely outwitted by a quartet of Formicans?
Well, in a sense I was. For I can see now that to Draca
and Nuru it was obvious that my relationship with Atta
was always my Achilles’ heel. Yet, though simple, common sense told me this, I never once imagined that Atta would be the one on whom they would fasten first, the
better to drag me down later. Even so, I was no such fool
as to give Draca or Nuru the slightest handle to use
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157
against us. Neither Atta nor I ever betrayed in public the
smallest evidences of friendship. Rather, in any gathering
both of us acted with extreme coolness and formality,
particularly after Subser had been assigned to me as mess
sergeant. Even at home in our gallery Atta was always at
pains to conceal from the Cutter the fact that he was
learning to play the flute or carving figures for our replica of the walnut house. The most he ever did was openly to discuss certain depressing aspects of human history,
such as the melancholy fact that of all the seers in the
Bible only Solomon had seen fit to mention Formicans.
During such conversations Subser usually stood against
the wall like some peasant servitor, and no expression
ever appeared on his stolid features. I think we may be
forgiven for not realizing that he was hoarding away
many an incomprehensible statement to report to his
superiors.
Our difficulty, of course, was that neither Atta nor I
had the slightest idea that anything untoward was about
to happen. This innocence was so complete that even in
the end what Subser actually reported to Draca and
Nuru remained hidden from me. For all I know, he may
not have been an informer for pay at all: he may have
been an honest patriot, full of regrets that he was forced
to do his duty toward a Formican whom he had once
admired and to whom he owed his escape from slavery.
The devilishness of Draca's accusation of Atta, when at
last it was revealed to me, was that it did not stop at the
simple crime of friendship. No, it stood four-square on
the more reprehensible crime of being a friend to a
Stranger and thus seeking to corrupt a new servant of
Fusa with a treasonable relationship.
All this I realized later but in the beginning the strokes
were too swift and too stunning to allow me to perceive
anything fully.
I had gone out to the new drill ground that warm day
for a final test of a new Fire Feeding regiment—the Rub-
icundian invasion was close at hand—and it was late in
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the evening, after dark, before I rode up to our gallery,
gave Trotta to my hostler at the entrance, and strode
down the corridor. I half expected that Atta would be
waiting to have supper with me. But Subser met me in
the gallery entrance with something as close to a personal
expression on his peasant face as it could support.
“Sir, Atta will not be back for supper tonight,” he said
with averted eyes. “I have put away his food and nectar.”
“So?” I said.
“I think they were Draca’s officers who came,” he
added.
“Draca’s officers?” I repeated. “What for?”
“They said he had committed some ancient offense or
treason,” said Subser uncomfortably. “Friendship, I believe.”
“I think you must be mistaken,” I said coldly.
“I could not be,” he answered. “The Food Supply has
already ordered his allowance to be transferred to the
Oval.”
“The Oval!” I exclaimed in dismay.
And I ate my supper in a state of extreme perturbation.
For although I did not as yet suspect the whole truth or
indeed find myself capable of imagining what might have
happened, I knew very well that the change that had
taken place in Atta’s views of Fusa since I first met him
would serve him very ill in defending himself against any
charge.
Meanwhile I myself had been neither consulted nor informed. Was I not, then, under the necessity of extreme caution before I made any move? Or would inaction on
my part indicate a degree of complicity or guilt that
would in itself be suspicious? These questions assailed
me as I ate my solitary supper under Subser’s disagreeable eye.
Ignorance, however, has never appealed to me, nor its
twin sister inaction; and of all situations this one appeared to me to demand no delay. As soon as supper was